Thursday January 4th 5K Day!!!!:
2:45am alarm. We barely slept due to nerves and excitement. I am always concerned about sleeping through the alarm before a race! We bundled up for the 5k. The start temp for the race was near freezing, but the winds were at 16mph, so the feels like temps was in the high teens to low 20’s. Bitter bitter cold! We got on our bus at 3:30am to head to the start. We got in line to meet Dopey. We waited 30 minutes and still had a good 20 more minutes to wait. But we had to bail because we needed to get to our corral and it was already 5am. The race starts at 5:30am. Teri and Ryan had the same corral placement for all the races and I was one corral behind them. You can opt to fall back in corrals to run with people, but you can’t move forward in corrals. So we had our plan to run the 5k and 10k all together. Since I am the slower runner of us, they had me dictate our walk/run ratios throughout the 5k and 10k. We all made our way to Corral C. I was so thankful we had mylar blankets to keep us warm while we waited. We had to chuck them before crossing the start line, otherwise our timing chip won’t register. Only Dopey Challengers have a timing chip for the 5k. All other 5k participants don’t have timing chips. This is to show proof that we ran the race. The 5k started in the EPCOT parking lot, looped around a service road and entered into the park under Test Track! We entered World Showcase at Norway and worked our way around the loop, towards the Land pavilion, by the Seas Pavilion and then to the front of the park. We exited to the side of the official exit and finished our race! It was such a fun course and fast. They had so many characters out, but the lines were so long and we didn’t want to stop since it was so cold. They even had Horace the Horse out! I kick myself for not stopping for that one! It took me about 2 miles before I could feel my feet since they were so cold. We got our finishing pics with our 5k Pluto medals, grabbed our snack boxes, water and bananas and made our way to the buses. We finished in the same area as we started the race. We only had to wait about 5-10 minutes for a bus. Teri showered first because she needed to go pick my niece Kailey up to come to the parks. She was still on winter break. She’s 13 but we didn’t want her to stay in the room overnight since we had to be up so early and she isn’t comfortable to be left in the hotel alone. Teri left to get Kailey. Ryan and I got showered and went down to the food court to have breakfast.
We went to the bus stop and the EPCOT bus pulled up within 1 minute! The AP line to enter was crazy long, but so were all the other lines. Teri and Kailey were just getting to the parking lot, so we walked through Mouse Gears while we waited and they met us there. First up was our Mickey and pals FP at 10:20am. All the characters loved our medals! We then went to Nemo and it was a 30 minute wait! And it really was! I don’t think I’ve ever waited in that queue and we used every single bit of it! Good news is that the heat was on and it was comfortable! We then watch the manatees and checked out the aquariums for a bit. Then off to Test Track for our FP at 11:40am. Thank goodness we had a FP because standby was 150 minutes!! Then off to Starbucks for some much needed caffeine! Then China for lunch of beef noodles and spicy chicken and rice. Ryan and I had a SSE FP and Teri and Kailey had Figment. So we separated. Ryan and I were booking it to make our FP. We arrived to find that it was temporarily down! I called Teri quickly to stop them from entering the Figment line. We met them there and used our FP to ride that instead! We were able to get a FP for Living with the Land at 3pm. We walked World Showcase. Stopped in Germany for Popcorn and Caramel Chocolate with Sea Salt. SOOOOOO yum!!!! We then went and used our Land FP. Then off to Mexico for a cruise on their boat ride with a 20 minute wait.
We were all tired so we left EPCOT at 5pm. Teri had to drive Kailey home. Ryan and I bused to Riverside. We were on the bus at 5:10pm and dropped of at the food court at 5:25pm. I got the turkey dinner plate again. Ryan got the ziti bake. He wasn’t impressed with his, so he ate some of mine. We got back to our room just after 6pm. Teri arrived to our room around 7pm. She grabbed herself dinner on her way home and back. We all got our cold weather gear set out for morning again to be ready for our 10k! Lights out at 8:15pm. Alarm set for 2:45am again.
Miles Logged 15.7 including 3.1 miles from the 5k race!
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was down. Although the wait for Test Track sounds ridiculous! I understand the other waits, but that one is a little over the edge of normal
challenges!! 
